


ghosting

by somewherenorth



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Canon Divergence, Death Scene, Eruri Week 2020, Ghosts, Heavy - Freeform, M/M, canonverse, eruri - Freeform, ghostwin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:48:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27745498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somewherenorth/pseuds/somewherenorth
Summary: erwin wakes as a ghost after the battle of shiganshina. four years later, when the war ends and levi returns to an empty farmhouse, erwin can't quite bear to leave him there alone
Relationships: Levi/Erwin Smith
Comments: 18
Kudos: 102





	ghosting

**Author's Note:**

> this has been a wip for over half a year now but 132 and eruri week gave me the boost I needed to finish it (the prompt was _afterlife _). big thanks to @erwinsuns on twitter for proofreading for me ♡ also, please bear in mind this fic contains a semi-graphic death scene__

He’s dead. That understanding hits as hard as the rock that killed him.

He’s dead, and yet, he hasn’t ceased.

Erwin sits up. His vision is clear, his mind sharper than it has been in years. His missing arm is back, faithful at his side. His body is gone – brought back for burial, he supposes – and the world is bright, more brilliant than he’s ever seen it. Shiganshina’s ruined neighborhoods spread out around him, jumbled and strewn with debris and rubble in the aftermath of the battle. The sun hangs low in the sky, just peeking above the wall, and, Erwin realises, there are no humans around.

He drifts down from the rooftop as if the air around him were water, gentle as a feather in the wind. A fox skulks out from a crumbling pile of what was once a house, loping across the street just in front of Erwin, paying him no mind as it goes. Erwin frowns, watching it for a moment before he clears his throat and waves his hands to shoo it on its way. He lets his arms fall back to his sides when the fox doesn’t flinch. It doesn’t see him.

The fox slips off into a ruined backalley and Erwin holds his hands out in front of him, turning them over in the sunlight before he stretches them out to brush against a mound of rocks. They pass right through, disappearing until he pulls them back. Erwin stares, repeats, and then stands for a moment, too struck to do anything other than turn on heel and start the trudge back to the old Survey Corps barracks, only place he knows to return to. He puts his hand through anything he passes – trees, more rubble, mounds of dirt and wood - watching it pass through one material after another with a mild, disconnected kind of interest.

The walk from Shiganshina is long and slow, and it gives Erwin time to _think_. He’s dead – obviously – and he’s also alone. None of his comrades, not Mike nor Nana nor any of the soldiers who’d fallen with him on the suicide charge are there. Where are they? Are they even still there, somewhere?

The sun sets before he reaches the barracks. Erwin tips his head up, gazing into the endless black of the night. The sky arches glassy and reticent above him and the stars leer down from their silent constellations, impartial as they always have been; they have no answers for him.

*

The barracks become a sort of makeshift home over the years Erwin spends waiting. He stays there - he has nothing better to do than wait and watch the barracks fall into disrepair around him – and though he finds none of his dead comrades’ ghosts stalking the lonely corridors, the old books and mementos provide entertainment enough. He thinks often of Levi, the man who’d loved him enough to let him die, and wonders what horrors he must be facing beyond the walls while Erwin gets to sit idle away from the horrors of the front line.

It takes four years for the war to end and for the soldiers to return. It happens out of the blue one day in late summer as the bells ring at noon. Crowds gather in the square outside, whooping and cheering and hollering until Erwin _has_ to get up and see what the fuss is about. He makes it to the window in time to see the troops returning, lead by a man with long blonde hair – Armin Arlert? It has to be – and flanked by Mikasa and Levi. _Levi’s alive_. Erwin’s stomach swoops.

Erwin doesn’t think as he vaults from the window and floats down to the cobbles. Nothing matters so long as he gets to Levi, he'll make up the rest once he gets there. He lands as Levi and his seal brown gelding disappear around a corner. Whatever formalities are prepared for the returning heroes, Levi evidently wants no part in them.

The rabble ignores him as he passes straight through them, taking off after Levi and his horse. He runs until he catches sight of them again when the houses give way to the countryside on the edge of town, headed off into the plain beyond. Erwin follows, gaze fixed on Levi as he goes. Going back with Levi is something Erwin doesn’t have to consider. Of course he’ll go back, if just to visit. He’ll leave Levi be as soon as he knows he's is alright, Erwin tells himself, and it’ll be worth it even if Levi can’t see him, doesn’t know he‘s there – which isn’t a certainty, Erwin reminds himself, because there’s a chance, no matter how small, that perhaps with Levi things will be different. Erwin clings to that thought and, foolish as it is, Erwin allows himself hope as he follows Levi back.

The dirt path through the farmland is raised up and it’s impossible to lose sight of Levi as he picks his way home. Clouds have rolled in and the light is falling by the time they arrive at Levi’s house, standing solemn on the plain, alone in a patchwork of fallow pastures and sparse oak trees. The house is shabby, complete with peeling paint and a porch of splintered wooden planks. Erwin approaches the door gingerly with a single hand outstretched. He drifts straight through as if the door weren’t there, and he finds Levi standing opposite in the living room.

Levi’s still, blank-faced and staring into nothing. Erwin pauses. Levi’s lost an eye and he looks like he’s lost his fight too. His remaining eye is dull, his face dull, his hair dull. Where before Erwin remembers him shining, burning with life and purpose and fire, he’s now a carcass stripped of his innards, something the carrion-crows would squabble over. Erwin thinks to himself then that Levi looks like a burnt-out fireplace, his embers long extinguished and ashes stone cold.

“Levi, my God, Levi–”

Levi turns around and leaves the room.

Erwin falters.

“Levi?”

Erwin rushes after him, lunging forward and reaching for his shoulder.

His hand passes straight through. Somewhere very deep and very dark Erwin knows it’s useless - but he’s overcome, he doesn’t care -

“Levi, I’ve been waiting, what happened? Are you alright?”

Levi turns on the tap and reaches for a couple of teabags.

 _No, no_.

Levi sets the kettle on the stove and turns back into the living room. Erwin trots after him and finds Levi in an armchair by the window, gazing out as he waits for the water to start whistling.

“ _Levi!”_ Erwin bellows, “fucking _listen_ to me!”

Levi leans against the back of his chair and yawns, scratching at the nape of his neck. Erwin falls to his knees and chokes out barking peals of laughter.

The kettle screams once the water boils a few minutes later and Levi pads off to make himself tea. Once he’s gone Erwin gets back to his feet, number now, keeping a tight rein over his emotions as he looks around. Levi’s living room is modest, cramped with a single window with a view over the prairie and barely enough room for two little leather armchairs.

Out of the corner of his eye Erwin catches sight of his old scuffed bolo tie acting as a paperweight to a thick wad of papers stacked on Levi’s table. The topmost is an old letter from their survey corps days, thinning and yellowed with age. The scouts’ insignia fades in the upper corner of the paper. An old survey corps jacket sits folded next to the papers, one long sleeve hanging off of the side of the table. He jolts when he recognises it’s his.

“Oh, Levi,” Erwin trails his finger through his old jacket as if he could still touch it, “I’m sorry.”

*

Erwin watches Levi's routine that evening. It’s intimate, the way Levi busies around to plump cushions and peers at himself in the mirror while he combs the tangles out of his hair. Once he’s set out a blanket and settled on the edge of his bed he looks a lot more like the Levi Erwin remembers. His shoulders are rounded, legs crossed daintily as he buttons his nightshirt. Erwin doesn’t miss the way the switchblade clacks as he sets it down on his bedside table.

Levi curls up under his single threadbare fleece, lying on his side with his back turned to the wall.

“Goodnight, Levi.”

There’s no answer, and it hurts more than Erwin expects.

*

Levi cries out for him in his sleep. Erwin notices it that first night, the way Levi tosses and mutters in his dreams like a man who’s lost his mind, rasping _Erwin,_ his name over and over like a dirge in the darkness. It cuts to the quick, but _he_ did this to Levi. The least he can do is keep him company through the night and hope by some miracle that Levi can feel his presence there.

*

Levi is a lonely man with a dour life. There's exhaustion in that forlorn face of his, a sad face on a sad man who’s seen too much. Erwin can’t quite bring himself to leave as the nights draw in and the year wears on - Levi has no visitors, does nothing outside of his reclusive routine, and leaving him like that feels wrong. The evenings are long and cold and when Levi takes his place in his armchair, Erwin dutifully takes his own opposite. At first Erwin longs for Levi to look up, say something, do _anything_ , but within a week he grows used to being invisible and he comes to appreciate the pensive silence of evenings with Levi.

Time is different now, Erwin finds, and everything passes in a haze. He has no want to sleep or eat, and he wonders less – why is he here? Why _him?_ Where are his comrades? Should he stay, or leave Levi be? None of it seems to matter as the weeks mellow into months. A kind of trance sets in, thick and syrup-sweet, and it leaves Erwin tethered only to Levi and some vague notion of responsibility to see him through.

*

He falls into a strange sort of routine, ghosting Levi around his chores and following along like a shadow or some wretched dog. Levi lives like a hermit, keeping to himself and spending his days cleaning, reading, tending his garden. Once a week Levi goes to market, dressed up in the suit and jacket Erwin had bought him almost ten years ago.

He’d earned stares even before Erwin had died, but now Levi parts the sea of townsfolk like a god. People have long since stopping trying to talk to him, and instead they glare from afar. Some faces are wary, some angry, some pitying. Levi pays none of them heed, keeps his head up and buys the same vegetables and eggs he does every week. Erwin wants to shout and hide Levi from the people who don’t understand – who would _never_ understand – but the people jostle through him and he can do nothing but drift uselessly along in Levi’s wake. Levi is too bitter for most, a pariah to the very people he’d saved.

*

And so, Erwin watches Levi grow old. It’s a lonely, miserable affair. He’s grey and grizzled by fifty and frown-lines knit their way across his face as his birthdays pass without celebration or acknowledgement. Grey hairs sprout at his temples and, though Levi doesn’t smile much, his mouth sinks further into his face.

Erwin wishes he could have grown old by Levi’s side. Levi never loves anyone – not in the way he loved Erwin. Erwin never sees anyone share his bed and though he hates to think of Levi lonely he’s glad of it deep down, and he loathes himself for it.

Erwin takes long walks during the long years he spends waiting. He has neither hunger nor exhaustion to heed but he’s careful not to stray too far from Levi’s shack on the plain. He doesn’t leave for longer than a week at a time and he doesn’t venture beyond the crest of hills on the horizon; he wants to save those new sights to see with Levi – because, surely, Levi will become like him, when the time comes. He _has_ to. Erwin won’t entertain an alternative, and he pushes any thoughts of the fallen comrades who are nowhere to be found to the back of his mind.

Each time he returns he finds Levi exactly as he left, living out the same slow day on repeat.

*

Erwin calls Levi all the things he was never able to.

“Lovely Levi,” Erwin murmurs one morning when Levi sits up in bed and scratches his head, grunting at the sunlight that dare shine into his eyes.

“Darling,” Erwin hums, sat opposite Levi in the living room as Levi picks out a book to read.

“Goodmorning. What are you doing today?” he asks as Levi eats breakfast – tea, an egg, and buttered toast, the same thing he eats every morning.

Levi can’t hear it, and he never will, but it feels like making up for lost time all the same.

*

There’s a knock on the door one rainy morning in March. The house smells of damp when Levi gets up with his trademark frown, slipping a knife into his pocket with trembling hands as he goes to answer. Erwin drifts along behind him as Levi takes a quick sharp breath and wrenches open the door.

Mikasa stands on the threshold, staring down at Levi. Her hair is plastered to her forehead, her clothes soaked. The roaring of the rain fills the silence between them and her little grey mare waits at the end of Levi’s garden, tethered to a fence post. Levi raises an eyebrow expectantly.

“Captain, I –”

“I’m not your captain,” Levi gruffs.

“Levi,” Mikasa corrects herself quickly, “I wondered how you are. We did. Me and the others.”

“M' fine,” Levi grumbles, quiet until he catches Mikasa’s stare and rolls his eyes, “alright, come in, then.”

She stoops inside and follows Levi into the kitchen, listening to his muttering as she flits around to fetch mugs and teabags while he fills the kettle and sets it to boil on the stove. She towers over him, still-young and in her prime. She's lonely too, Erwin sees it in her weary face and the gloomy shadows around her eyes. Talk turns to the war as they settle in the living room, to the things that happened after Erwin’s death, of the pain that followed the fighting. Erwin gives the two of them a rueful smile, takes his leave, and grants them their privacy.

*

Time blurs and flows like a river. The years rush like swirling eddies, all twisted and rippled as they pass Erwin by. Levi’s sixtieth and seventieth come and go and the cheerless wrinkles around his eyes begin to sag. Each October Levi makes the lonely hike to Erwin’s grave. Towns spring up around him and he becomes more of a shut-in than ever. Levi’s achy now, Erwin’s sure of it when he sees Levi shuffle stiffly to and fro, the way he grunts when he bends, and the way he trembles on his feet. His old wounds play up and he spends more time than ever in his armchair by the window, waiting for something that never seems to happen.

He's jumpy, too. Thrice now Levi has woken in the night and ended up stalking his rooms with a knife in hand having convinced himself of an intruder that never was. Erwin sees the wild terror of his wheeling eyes flash in the darkness and in the fearful, deep-gouged shadows of his face he sees the memories of the war Erwin put him through. Sometimes Levi hears a mouse or the wind and sometimes he hears nothing at all. Erwin wants to calm him, to rub his back and say _Levi, love, there’s nothing there_ but he can’t, so he follows along Levi’s useless hunt, inept as he always has been.

*

Levi adopts a cat in the spring. It pops its head out of the daffodils one morning, Levi stoops inside to fetch some offcuts, and then it never leaves. It’s a vindictive little thing, spindly and spider-legged with a baleful shine in its eyes - but Levi is so gentle with it. He doesn’t seem to mind picking grey hairs off of his sofa or his bedding, nor does he mind the way it scratches at the wooden legs of his table. Whenever it wanders by at mealtimes Levi offers it little chunks of meat and in the eveningtime, when Levi sits doleful in his armchair, he lets it sleep on his lap. The thing’s just a bag of bones draped in a coarse, scabby pelt, but Levi cradles it almost like a child.

“Alright, cat? That nice?” Levi croons to it, rubbing the cat behind the ears and earning a shaky sputter of a purr.

For once Levi isn't alone, and Erwin thinks he looks decidedly less miserable with a cat curled in his lap in the evenings.

*

Summer comes and goes. Levi spends it tending his garden and chopping firewood for the winter while the cat stalks around the underbrush as he works. Erwin sets out once the trees start to turn and drop from their branches, drawn out to wander again. He stays away for longer this time, taking his time to see the new towns that have sprung from hamlets and farming villages with the decades of peace.

*

Levi’s skin-and-bones cat dies. Erwin only realises once he returns in midwinter and finds Levi’s skinned the thing and put the pelt next to Erwin’s shabby old jacket and bolo tie.

Sometimes Levi takes the pelt, lays it on his lap, and naps there in the stupor of a spring afternoon, windows thrown open with the catskin laid over his thighs. He brushes his fingers through the bristles of fur when he wakes for long enough. There’s a pang in Erwin’s chest whenever he has to watch, because Levi looks so much like a senile old man, a lunatic in his armchair by the window.

*

The next October Levi grows too frail to make the walk to Erwin’s grave. He sets off just before dawn, as he always has done, and returns half an hour later, dismayed with his thin lips pursed into a single line. He’s unsettled for the rest of the day, restless with wet eyes that catch the light, agitated until the next morning when he leaves in the direction of the nearest town and returns from the trip in a carriage.

He stays at home the year after, sat in his armchair with Erwin’s old jacket draped over his shoulders and the bolo tie clutched tightly in his hands.

*

“ _Fuck!”_

Erwin hears Levi yell from the porch. He scrambles inside to find him in a heap on the floor at the end of the corridor, groaning like a dying man and panting like an animal in a snare, beside himself. Erwin stands aghast, frozen for a moment.

“Shit, shit, shit...” Levi chants, curling in on himself and clutching at his hip.

Levi’s voice shakes, gravelly with age and agony. There’s nothing Erwin can do but watch, stand by like some sick voyeur as Levi fights, driven on by an instinct Erwin will never understand. He’s still for a long time, grappling with his breathing until it evens out and he can raise a hand to grope at the wall for support, every muscle in his arm taut and trembling.

It’s dark by the time Levi hauls himself to his armchair. He spends the night there, and doesn’t get up until the next afternoon.

*

Levi never fully recovers from the fall. He falters and stumbles around his house, dragging his bad leg along as he limps from one day into the next. The walk to market is near-impossible now. Levi buys less, eats less, and as his flesh sloughs away Erwin begins to see bones poking at his sallow skin. Weeds have long-overtaken his garden. Levi is tired, so tired, and dust begins to gather in the house.

*

Summer that year is sweltering, baking and ferocious and it leaves Levi sleeping more than he wakes. He spends week after week slumped in his armchair with the window open at his side, his head lolling onto his shoulder with his swollen ankles crossed. The breeze ruffles his hair as he slumbers and the rise-fall of his chest is so slight that every now and then Erwin has to squint to make sure he’s still breathing.

*

A spate of brutally hot days takes its toll. Levi’s been wheezing and bedridden for the last day and a half. His breathing is a series of shallow gasps through cracked lips, whistles of wind through autumn leaves, and his white hair lies tangled in mats about his head. His chest rattles as he struggles for air and his eyes are sealed shut, crusty around the edges where he’s too weak to clean himself. A glass of stale water sits on his bedside table, just out of reach.

The sun begins to rise, staining Levi’s cupboard of a bedroom red, and he makes a strangled gurgle somewhere deep in his throat. He raises a shaky arm and flails it up into the air, delirious and grasping for nothing in particular.

Erwin’s been watching Levi waste away for almost five decades now. Still, after all these years, Erwin wishes he could reach out and touch him, brush the back of his hand over Levi’s mottled cheek or press a damp washcloth to his sore mouth. Erwin sets his jaw, ignores the ache in his soul, and he thinks of all the things he’ll tell Levi once it happens. It won’t be long now.


End file.
